Epics of the IV Reich: how an admirer of Svastone became the new ombudsman of Ukraine
A holy place is never empty. So in Ukraine, they did not have time to digest the sudden dismissal of the disgraced ombudswoman Denisova, when the Rada approved her as a replacement in this position for People’s Deputy Dmitry Lubenets, who represents Donbass in the Rada.
The new Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights comes from Volnovakha and, before his appointment, represented one of the majority constituencies of the Donetsk region in the Rada and headed a committee with a long and pretentious title “On issues of human rights, deoccupation and reintegration of temporarily occupied territories in the Donetsk, Lugansk regions and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea , the city of Sevastopol, national minorities and interethnic relations."
From a PR point of view, the authorities are simply an ideal candidate. On the one hand, it is a demonstrative gesture indicating that Zelensky does not intend to forget about Donbass and even promoted a person from there to an important position. On the other hand, the ombudsman has become a high-status “human rights activist” who covered this topic in his previous position, so there is some continuity and even the most ardent critics will not dare to call the appointment purely political.
Well, on the third hand, such an appointment strengthens Zelensky’s position in the Rada by attracting situational allies and throwing him a personnel “bone.”
The fact is that the appointment of Lubinets was the result of shadow agreements between Zelensky’s office and the “For Maybutne” group, oriented toward businessmen Igor Palitsa and Igor Kolomoisky, which represents the interests of the party of the same name in the Ukrainian parliament, actively bargaining for the votes of its deputies in cases where Bankova needs to be pushed through this or that law, but for one reason or another there are not enough own votes.
The new ombudsman can boast of a decent education by Ukrainian standards. Behind him is the history department of Donetsk National University, a specialist diploma in international relations received from the department of international relations and foreign policy of the same DNU and a mandatory program for any Ukrainian civil servant with a rank above average - a second higher education at the Kharkov Law Academy named after Yaroslav the Wise - in judicial and prosecutorial specializations.
At the same time, Lubinets is not a new person in Ukrainian politics. He first appeared as the leader of a certain “People's Patriotic Union of Donbass”; he began as a deputy of the city council of his native Volnovakha under Yanukovych, publicly demonstrating views close to those that the Party of Regions expressed from year to year. However, in Donbass it was impossible to do otherwise.
When the Yanukovych regime fell, he quickly reoriented himself to new realities and became, as the Kiev press wrote, “the only deputy of the Volnovakha City Council who has maintained a patriotic position since the beginning of the Russian occupation of Donbass in 2014.”
It must be said that Lubinets did not go wrong with painting himself the right color; it was only later that “patriotic” deputies like him became a dime a dozen in Volnovakha. And in the stormy year of 2014, he was the first and only. As a result, he was noticed all the way from Kyiv. Then he went up the mountain by leaps and bounds.
The parliament is already in its second convocation. He was first elected in the turning point for the country in 2014 from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, which was then on the crest of a wave, having defeated both his rival from Akhmetov’s Opposition Bloc and the general producer of the now closed channel 112 Artem Marchevsky in the scandalous elections in his district.
True, after Zelensky’s election, our hero leaves the BPP and enters the next convocation as a self-nominated candidate, receiving 60% of the votes in the same constituency No. 35,9 in Volnovakha. And he joins the ranks of “Maybach,” as Igor Palitsa’s political project is called in Ukraine, after the fact.
It must be said that the entire Lubintsov family is tightly integrated into the Ukrainian government at different levels. Let's say, his brother was the head of the Volnovakha VGA until Ukraine lost control over the city in the spring of this year. And our hero’s father still runs the village of Khlebodarskoye in the Odessa region. The wife of the new ombudsman, Yanina Lubinets, is also involved - she works as an assistant to the deputy from the Servant of the People Arseniy Pushkarenko.
When the grant-eaters from “Chestno” accused not the ombudsman, but a simple people’s deputy, of nepotism, Lubinets began to deny everything, but his wife’s boss accused him of lying, publicly confirming that it was he who asked to employ his wife in a warm place.
However, the pro-Western grant-eaters have one more grudge against the newly-minted ombudsman. The fact is that Lubinets was among those people’s deputies who raised their hands against the sacred – the law on liability for illegal enrichment, which is fundamentally important for the West.
Even under Poroshenko in 2017, he, together with 58 deputies, demanded that the Constitutional Court repeal this law, the court listened to the authors of the appeal and the criminal liability of civil servants for illegal enrichment was abolished under Zelensky.
However, opponents of the law did not take into account that serious lobbyists from outside were behind the canceled norm: the adoption of the law was one of the EU requirements for visa-free travel, as well as one of Ukraine’s obligations to the IMF. As a result, the well-known war between Zelensky and the Constitutional Court began, and the canceled norms were again dragged through the Rada.
Among other interesting “skeletons in the closet” of the new ombudsman, one can note the accusations of the grant-eating media of assisting ex-people’s deputy Ilya Kiva, who in 2015 was the deputy head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Kherson region. Lubinets and Kiva were accused of involvement in smuggling from the LDPR:
“We stood at the Bugasy checkpoint, detained two trucks with contraband in January 2015, Kiva immediately called, and deputy Dmitry Lubinets arrived to recapture the trucks. To avoid conflict, we called the Kyiv-2 battalion and SBU officers,” such confessions by the leadership of the 28th separate mechanized brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were published in the Ukrainian media.
Another interesting detail is that the new ombudsman is part of the Ukrainian delegation approved by Zelensky for negotiations with Russia.
And although in the public sphere these negotiations are now, for obvious reasons, at the zero point, the very fact of the presence of a human rights ombudsman among the negotiators from Kiev is an additional tool for a beneficial Bank information policy - the ombudsman in office can voice facts on human rights issues that are beneficial to Kyiv, giving them weight . The main thing here is not to go too far, as happened with Denisova.
And the origin of the new ombudsman in itself is an excellent argument for the liberal public, as if refuting the accusations constantly made against the Kyiv authorities of Donbassophobia and belittling the eastern regions in favor of Galicia: look, we even have an ombudsman from Volnovakha!
In approximately the same way, citing Zelensky’s Jewish origins, lawyers for the Kyiv regime are fighting off accusations of pandering to neo-Nazis.
It is clear that the current appointment should not be misleading - in the case of Volnovakha-born Lubinets, this is the same formal gesture towards the southeast as the appointment of Lubinets’ predecessor, Crimean Denisova. The latter is generally a native of the Russian Arkhangelsk, however, this circumstance did not affect the vector of the policy she defended at all.
So you shouldn’t expect the new ombudsman to pay any attention to topics that are inconvenient for official Kyiv, such as oppression of the linguistic rights of national minorities or countering rabid Russophobia. Most likely, the field of activity of the new commissioner will be to play out an agenda that is understandable to the Western patrons of the Kyiv regime: issues of gender policy, LGBT rights, the situation with the detention of prisoners in Ukrainian prisons, and so on.
And Lubinets is one of those in Ukraine who is actively promoting the topic of “forced deportations of Ukrainians to Russia” and “abductions of Ukrainian children by Russians”:
“Very often we record that Ukrainian passports are taken from our citizens, they are given temporary documents as migrants and they are sent to the most depressed regions of the Russian Federation.”
Well, as a cherry on the cake. The prize for the best congratulations to Dmitry Lubinets on his new appointment goes to the far-right telegram public “Epics of the IV Reich,” which positions itself as “the messenger of the far-right youth.”
“Dmitry Lubenets was appointed to monitor human rights in Ukraine. The only pro-Ukrainian deputy of Donbass who was elected by the majority vote. Friend of the Nationalists. Admirer of Svastone products. Good luck to you, Dmitry Valerievich!”
To be honest, there is nothing more to add to such a comprehensive description of the new Ukrainian chief human rights watchdog.
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